The Witch of Hebron (4 page)

“Something outside what’s normal,” the doctor said.

Brother Jobe smiled thinly, and the small features of his round, beardless face seemed to crowd together as if his thoughts pained him. The silence in the room was so profound, squirrels could be heard scratching somewhere in the soffits.

“This here’s excellent poteen,” Brother Jobe finally said.

“Come on. What’s your deal?” the doctor said.

“Okay, this here’s my deal,” Brother Jobe said. “I can’t bring anything that’s dead back to life. I can go the other way, though.”

“Go the other way?”

“You ain’t stupid, you know what the other way is.”

“You mean you can kill?”

Brother Jobe cocked his head a degree. “So to say. Take life away from something that has it.”

The doctor reflected a moment.

“How does that make you anything more than a common killer?” he said eventually.

“Just a moment, there, sir. We both deal in matters of life and death.”

“I’ve never deliberately taken somebody’s life,” the doctor said.

“What makes you think I have?”

“I saw what you did to Wayne Karp.”

“What makes you sure I done that?”

“You were the only other one there.”

“Robert Earle was there.”

“Robert Earle was asleep in the next room,” the doctor said. “When the bodies came in here, I measured the wounds both on your son and on Karp with a micrometer. They were identical down to the millimeter. On each one, the same tooth sheared off at the same place, at precisely the same angle. Quite a coincidence if you ask me. I’d come to the conclusion that you were trying to make a point.”

“Well,” Brother Jobe said, puffing out his cheeks, “there’s whatever I do in the common world, and then there’s the Lord’s justice.”

The doctor poured himself another drink and proffered the bottle toward Brother Jobe, who shook his head and put a hand over his glass. “Not that there was anything wrong with it.”

“Wrong with what you do?” the doctor asked.

“No, with your hooch,” Brother Jobe said. “I best be on my way.”

“One more thing.”

“What’d that be, Doc?”

“I’m not a religious man, really.”

“I suppose I know that.”

“But sometimes I wonder—”

“Anytime you want to come to the Lord—”

“What I wonder is, which Lord do you really serve? Or think you serve?”

“Now, whatever do you mean by that?”

“There’s a Lord of light,” the doctor said, “and we’re given to understand that there’s a corresponding Lord of darkness. Right? Consistent with the nature of our world—male and female, night and day, yin and yang, whatever you want to call it.”

“That’s mighty interesting, sir,” Brother Jobe said, “but the ding-dong of the ying-yang is a bit beyond my country education. I’m sorry I can’t help your dog. A dog is a great comfort, especially in these here times. I hope you can find another good one and raise it up to have some respect for critters bigger than itself. Good night to you.”

FIVE

Robert Earle was spading manure into a raised garden bed behind his house when he looked up from his work to see a familiar figure standing ten paces away in evening light beside the old refrigerator he used as a meat smoker. It was Jane Ann Holder, wife of the congregational minister, Loren Holder. Jane Ann had been Robert’s lover until that summer when the young widow Britney Watling came into his household. Robert was Loren’s best friend. Loren had been unable to perform in a conjugal way for some time, and Robert had been a widower for some time, and in the course of things an arrangement found its way between the three of them, not without tensions, resentments, and complications. Then, suddenly, Robert had discontinued his relations with Jane Ann when Britney, wife of the slain Shawn Watling moved in, at first to become his housekeeper, but then becoming, in the parlance of town gossip, his new woman.

Robert stopped digging and rested his calloused hands on the butt of the spade’s long handle. He took in Jane Ann on a tide of longing and regret. She wore her long hair pinned up like a Gibson Girl’s in their great-great-grandmothers’ time. He recalled the many nights he’d watched her take out the pins and let her hair fall along her shoulders and down her breasts. He worried about Jane Ann and what they thought they had been doing in those years of tortured passion, and especially what a burden it had brought upon her. His part in what would become of her now pained him as much.

“Your table greens are looking very handsome, Robert,” Jane Ann said.

“It’s good to see you, Jane Ann.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“I’ve got some nice lettuce here if you’d like to take some home.”

“Trying to get rid of me already?”

Robert shook his head. “I know you’re mad at me,” he said.

“Let’s not call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“Call it an unhappy woman who doesn’t like the outcome of a certain situation, and has to wear a mask of benign serenity going around town, and who worries incessantly about her missing son who has been gone for two years, and sometimes despises her husband as much as she loves him, and misses you terribly.”

This was the point at which Jane Ann’s shoulders hunched and she dissolved in tears. Robert jammed his spade in the planting bed and went to her, but when he tried to comfort her, she shook him off. He stood by helplessly, watching her weep.

“I miss you, too,” he said. “But I needed someone like a wife.”

“Is she
like
a wife, your little kitten?”

“There’s nothing wrong with her.”

“Unlike me,” Jane Ann said. “There must be a lot wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, either.”

“Then why can’t I get on with my life?”

“I could guess, but it would only upset you again.”

“Try.”

“You’d never leave Loren. You know it. I know it. You and me, we could never be together like a man and wife. Especially in this town, in these times.”

Jane Ann shook off a final sob and then straightened her shoulders resolutely. Looking up at Robert with damp, red eyes, she touched his arm and then batted at his shirtsleeve.

“I could find another lover, I suppose,” she said.

Robert didn’t offer a comment on that.

“Do I sound like a calculating slut?”

“You’re a fine person living in circumstances you never expected.”

He put a hand to her cheek.

“You smell like manure,” she said.

Just then, Britney Watling, Robert’s housemate, came through the back door into the outside summer kitchen that would soon be dismantled for the winter. A candle burned behind her inside the house. Wood smoke curled above the roof where low purple clouds hung in a pumpkin-colored sky. For a while, the three of them stood silently, triangulated in the darkening garden as leaves fluttered to the ground in the breezeless air.

“Supper’s on, Robert,” Britney said. Her voice was surprisingly husky for such a petite woman. “Hello Jane Ann. Would you have some cider with us?”

Jane Ann declined, though she thought it was kind of Britney to ask.

SIX

Jasper Copeland cried all the way to the stubble field and found his father’s wicker creel with the trout in it. The stallion was still out in his paddock, as if nothing had happened. He wondered why the Jesus people hadn’t punished him, at least shut him up in a barn where he couldn’t harm another living thing. The world that, an hour earlier, had never seemed so filled with loveliness, now seemed hopelessly cruel, faithless, and ugly. The orange sky streaked with low purple clouds looked like a sickness sweeping over the land. It looked like the things his father removed from human bodies in surgeries, terrible things he’d had to burn in a wood-fired incinerator to make sure they would cause no more trouble in this world. Jasper recalled the words of his friend, Ned Allison, about the filthy hermit, that
nature was strange and harsh
. The reality of Willie’s death assaulted him over and over with shocking freshness each time. The thought of the dog’s warm fur against his cheek brought a surge of anger and hatred that he had never known before. He sobbed all the way home.

It was dark when he got there. His mother was just getting supper on the table. His father, the doctor, entered the large kitchen that was the heart of the house carrying a candle in a brass saucer. He’d been in his study reading history, Wheeler on the Battle of Chancellorsville, with yet another glass of pear brandy. The boy and his father seemed embarrassed to encounter each other back in the normality of suppertime in the kitchen. Nobody spoke. Even Jasper’s little sister, Dinah, waited silently behind her chair, eyes downcast, for the others to come to the table. Jeanette, at the stove, ladled a blood-dark rabbit stew into four porcelain soup plates decorated with Chinese dragons.

Jasper put the creel on a counter. Muttering “I’m not hungry,” he brushed past his father and headed upstairs to his room.

The family sat down to supper without him, an absolutely silent meal at which their collective pain seemed to occupy the empty chair like an uninvited guest who monopolized their attention. When they were finished, the doctor put a generous square of corn bread on a little plate and went upstairs to his son’s room. Jasper lay on his bed facing the wall with his clothes on and a candle burning on his night table. The doctor sat at the end of the bed, but the boy didn’t stir or acknowledge his father’s presence.

“You awake, Jas?”

The boy groaned lowly.

“I brought you some corn bread.”

“I don’t want any.”

“I’ll leave it here on the table.”

Jasper didn’t respond.

“We can get another dog,” the doctor said.

Jasper flipped over so quickly the doctor recoiled.

“Willie wasn’t any dog. He was like a person.”

“All dogs seem that way after a while.”

“It’s not fair. Why did he have to die?”

The doctor felt a restless anxiety run through him at a question he could not possibly answer.

“You can always get another dog. I’ll never get another fly rod like that one,” he said, regretting it instantly.

“That damn horse stomped on it just like he stomped on Willie,” he practically shouted.

“What the hell were you doing in the paddock with it?”

“I was trying to save Willie.”

The doctor cursed the brandy that had compromised his self-control, making him sound less like a father than a child.

“I know… I know,” he said.

“You’re the one that let him die.”

“That’s not true. You heard what Mr. LaBountie said.”

“You could have made that Brother Jobe bring him back.”

“He can’t bring things back.”

“Then how come you asked him to?”

The doctor didn’t know what to say. He could only assume that the boy had managed to overhear his exchange with Brother Jobe, so there was no denying it had taken place.

“Sometimes grown-ups are like children and they confuse their wishes and prayers with what they know is real.”

“You think he has powers, too. Don’t you?”

“I don’t really know what kind of powers he has,” the doctor said, “or if he has any powers at all. It’s not so hard to pull the wool over people’s eyes.”

“You know what I think?” Jasper said.

“What?”

“If he’s anything, he’s the devil. Or something like a devil.”

“He’s just a blowhard,” the doctor said. He realized that his head had begun to throb. “We’ll get another dog for you,” he said wearily.

“I don’t want another dog. I want Willie.”

“I know,” the doctor said, “but you have plenty of love left in your heart to give to another dog. When the time comes.”

Jasper flipped back over, facing the wall.

The doctor blew out Jasper’s candle.

“You shouldn’t fall asleep with an open flame in the room,” he said. “It’s not evil, it’s just very unwise.”

SEVEN

Jane Ann Holder took her time going home. Everything about the night was fraught with memory and emotion. The sensations infused her as though she had become little more than a vehicle driven by them. She plied the town streets like a wraith in a ghost story, seeming to glide unnaturally past houses where, here and there, a candle burned, or voices could be heard against the quiet absence of machines, or a piano tinkled a Chopin etude in a minor key. Turning onto Van Buren Street, she saw a three-quarter waxing moon rise over Deeds Hill, which defined the town at its southern compass point as Pumpkin Hill did to the northeast, so that the town seemed to lie in the cupped palm of an immense benevolent being that cherished it. In the tumult of her sadness she was reassured by the thought that she belonged to a great network of souls and living things that were all cared for by something like God.

She roamed the streets of town until the growing chill made her shiver, and then she went home to the rectory beside the Congregational church where she lived with Loren. Approaching it from way down Salem Street, she saw candles glow in several windows on the first floor. Loren would be going back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, where he liked to keep his work at hand—an elegy, a community calendar, or a manual on pickling meat, now that it was the season for slaughtering animals.

Loren enjoyed cooking, and fall was the great season for cookery; it was harvest time, when there was plenty of everything, so much that it often felt like the old times. Back then you merely nipped into the supermarket after the workday and picked up anything you wanted: short ribs, lamb shanks, duck breasts, mangoes from the faraway tropics, artichokes from California, aged vinegars from Sicily, Mexican chipotles, Belgian chocolate, French lentils, black pepper, curry powders, English Stilton cheeses, and delicious coffee—Kona from Hawaii, Jamaican Blue Mountain, Brazil arabica, Sumatra, Kenya. All gone, all gone.

Jane Ann first met Loren at a drug-saturated fraternity rave at Middlebury College, back in the previous century. She had transferred there after a disappointing stint as an art major at nearby Bennington, which was run like a seedy carnival. Middlebury was a step up—a compact, erudite, outdoorsy little college for rich kids who didn’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Brown. In those days, Loren was quite the party animal, as well as captain of the lacrosse team. He was a big, handsome, shambling fraternity boy with taped-up loafers, a goofy smile, and an interest in poetry. After the rave, they went at it in his choice fourth-floor turret room of the rattletrap fraternity house. Five, six times before morning. The room was painted Chinese red. Loren had a beautiful silk Oriental dressing gown that he let her wear to the bathroom down the hall. He also had a hookah the size of a double bassoon and a Jeep with a ragtop. Soon she was his girl. The popular drug Ecstasy was what led Loren into theological studies and eventually the Congregational ministry. His first assignment was Glens Falls, where they spent eleven years, but they eventually came to Union Grove, twenty miles to the southeast, when the position opened. It was a sweet, quiet corner of the upper Hudson Valley, at the time a bedroom community for people who drove to well-paid jobs as far off as Albany, the state capital. Here they’d raised their son, Evan, who had gone off with Robert Earle’s boy, Daniel, two years ago to see what happened to the rest of the United States after the tribulations. The two young men hadn’t been heard from since.